The manufacture of consumer clothing by offshore suppliers has dramatically increased during the last 25 years. Currently, only 4% of the total retail clothing industry spending of $172.8 B is spent on wares manufactured in the United States. The balance of the retail spending is spent on goods manufactured in foreign countries, with a concentration of expenditures centered in the Far East. This massive spending on imported clothing contributes significantly to the United States' international trade deficit and to the loss of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of jobs in the United States.
In fact, the entire United States retail clothing industry is burdened with certain fundamental inefficiencies. Retailers require large-footprint stores, expensive warehousing capabilities and costly fixtures and accoutrements. Significant build-out and decorating expenditures are necessary to make retail clothing stores appealing to their clientele. Substantial investments are made in inventory in order to make an appealing customer presentation. Each year an enormous amount of clothing stock undergoes dramatic price reductions in order to move distressed, end-of-season or otherwise non-selling inventory. Additionally, almost 5% of all goods are written-off as un-sellable items, or “shrink”. These inefficiencies are not curable in the industry's current mode of operation.
In addition to the inherent structural inefficiencies described above, the retail clothing industry faces significant cultural challenges. Fashions change markedly, in many clothing items from season to season. Customers do not easily fit standardized sizes, and consumer tastes are fickle, often changing quickly and in an unpredictable manner. As is well-known to the reader, pre-manufactured clothing comes in pre-determined, standardized sizes. Many persons do not fit correctly into a standardized size. In fact, many consumers buy the “least worst” standardized fit and then have it tailored or just cope with an imperfect garment.
The more time-consuming the clothing supply chain becomes, that is the longer it takes from the assessment of consumer taste to the placement of goods on retailers' shelves, the greater the mark-down risk faced by the retailer and the shorter the sales cycle available to them. In theory, this gives a huge competitive advantage to domestic suppliers who can compress the time to market. In practice however, the United States has not recognized this competitive advantage. As described above, the United States retail clothing industry has both structural and cultural challenges, making profitability difficult and motivating the importation of significant percentages of inventory from low-cost, third-party countries.
While the clothing industry suffers, the United States has a surplus of underutilized, skilled labor. The United States has tens of millions of people that have manufacturing skills, would like to earn extra money and health benefits, but find a typical 9-to-5 office job impossible to balance against family needs. They may, for example, have family obligations or health problems that prevent them from working outside the house on a regular basis. They may lack access to transportation. Or, there may be no appropriate work in their geographical area. It would be highly desirable to provide opportunities whereby millions of United States citizens benefit from productive work-at-home employment.
As is known to the reader, the Internet effectively collapses geography with respect to communications between various parties. The Internet has thus been used as a communications channel whereby to create virtual offices and workplaces. In different embodiments, the Internet has been used to create a community of networked workers who provide different types of labor and services for remote employers. It is further known to use the Internet to train workers, coach and educate them on complex tasks, and evaluate their on line work product. Many different compensation scales have been used for compensating work-at-home employees.
As is discussed above, the retailing of consumer clothing is a “fickle” business. Styles change with great frequency. However, an individual consumer's generalized clothing preferences are often stable over a relatively long period of time. That is, while styles change with great frequency, individual consumer's interpretations of style are more enduring. In practice, consumers tend to cling to preferences in, for example, colors and “cuts” or styles that lend themselves to particular body types and which don't change from season to season. These preferences are predictable, and can be incorporated into new, changing styles with each successive season.
Given the state of available labor, the capabilities of the Internet as a communications medium and the particular needs of the retail clothing industry, the present inventors have determined that it would be particularly desirable to use the networking capabilities of the Internet to simultaneously solve the problems of both the labor force and the clothing industry.